The most annoying thing for me was the huge internet data usage by snap updates but it is better now.
Even though it showed 300mb for a Firefox update, but only consumed 80mb and everything updated and working wonderfully ! 😅 😍 👑
The New app store is beautiful 🙌
(just sharing my experience 😅 )
Makes sense. I’ve been pretty excited about snap on desktop since 2014-15 since it promised to deliver Android-style unbreakable software update capability that finally unlocks updating parts of the system out of band and safely. I switched to snap from all the PPAs I used in 2016. GIMP, Inkscape, etc. I think I was able to get rid of the remaining PPAs in 2018. No package breakage since then, trivial OS upgrades. My main machine has been upgraded through every LTS since 14.04. It’s glorious. Yes there were some bugs with snap itself and missing features, cough… “pending update notification” …cough, but that’s par for the course for any system under development and I’ve never seen a real showstopper so far. Flatpak is also useful of course and I do use it but it can’t do system components as far as I know.
Thank you for sharing that because you do make a great and important point about snaps, namely that they can replace unsecure PPA’s with secure Snaps. That sounds like the best argument for Snaps.
Personally I didn’t have a problem with the Snaps themselves, but the forcing me to use it cough… “Firefox” …cough…
At least have Firefox in the apt repo so people have a choice. That’s literally** what the Free Software movement is about: the user has the choice and power. Not the dev or even the machine.
The security sandbox provided by snap is a major point to allowing packages “from anywhere” that you don’t necessarily fully trust. Like 3rd party vendor packages. The deb installer runs the package installation of debs as root and it allows them to do anything. I’m not even talking about running the software, a deb can run anything and do anything to the OS at install time. Its security model requires trusted repositories where someone gatekeeps what packages can reach your computer. Snap had the sandbox design since its inception to solve this problem. It wasn’t something tacked on later.
The Firefox snap rollout was a shit show. The snap package itself had defects such as lacking important performance optimizations that were done in other snap packages for example. Then there was the update notification that bugged people to close the app only to show again if they reopened it soon after. Those were ultimately solvable problems but Canonical let them trickle into most users’ desktops during an LTS release… And this was many people’s first impression of snap - those few annoying bugs - even if the system has been solid and running, solving real use cases for years prior. A.k.a. a shit show.